How do virtual waiting rooms work?
A deep dive into how virtual waiting rooms and queue management systems work to prevent system overloads and crashes; Know from Queue Fair Experts.
Manage traffic peaks. Avoid website crashes from high demand.
Treat your visitors with unrivalled fairness.
Queue-Fair is the original virtual waiting room for busy websites, invented by us and originally patented in 2004. When your site has more visitors than it can handle gracefully, the excess visitors are automatically sent away from your webservers to a branded online queue - it then sends visitors back to your site in first-come, first-served order at the rate that you desire.
We handle the world's largest queues. We queue hundreds of thousands of people every day.
By using the world's most accurate, highest quality, most powerful and best value Virtual Waiting Room platform, you ensure that your site can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate. Your site visitors, shoppers, ticket buyers, and app users always get the responsive experience they require, even when you are really busy. They won't see a crashed site.
‘Queue-Fair is great for our large online retail event. It came across as very intuitive to use and worked absolutely fine. Queue-Fair provides continuity and increases confidence for customer online experience. We definitely have plans for Queue-Fair in the future for events where we are expecting a huge deluge of traffic and participation in larger retail events.’
‘A five-star Queue-Fair Review! The team is extremely professional and kind, very punctual and on point to customer needs. Honestly, we get along well in every aspect. Queue-Fair is an essential tool for managing events with many attendees.’
‘When we opened COVID vaccinations to 16-29 year-olds, we turned to Queue-Fair for help, who quickly set us up with a fully branded Virtual Waiting Room. That afternoon, Queue-Fair fairly queued 450,000 people for us. Queue-Fair meant our system was able to accept bookings at a rate it could handle, without overload. We're very grateful for the exceptional support from Queue-Fair, and we launched with great success. The queue worked perfectly, and helped us to overcome a punctual uncovered technical problem that otherwise would have ruined the campaign. Thank you very very much Queue-Fair for your offering! It’s much appreciated. Queue-Fair saved us!’
‘Brilliant. I had a sleepless night worrying the website was going to crash again after the last time we tried to run our popular promotion without Queue-Fair. I'm so delighted to have found your solution. Thanks for your responsiveness - it is hugely appreciated that you got this set up for us in less than a day, and it worked perfectly. Awesome. Lovely stuff. Golden. Thanks again; this means the world to me. I'm going to sleep well tonight. Legendary.’
‘The people at Queue-Fair went above and beyond to help us implement their queuing system within one day. With over 25,000 people in the queue, they helped us manage traffic during our high peaks. Queue-Fair does what it is meant to do; queue people at a competitive price. We are happy with the Queue-Fair system and will keep using it during future events.’
‘Superb product backed by outstanding customer service. Queue-Fair has been the perfect solution for handling spikes in demand for tickets through our website. Queue-Fair handles spikes in web traffic, helps avoid server overload, and allows our customers to easily see that they are being queued fairly. Our customers can monitor queue progress in real time. Queue-Fair's product and service exceeded our expectations.’
‘A great solution for efficient queueing backed by competent and amazing professionals. Queue-Fair is very user-friendly and simple to integrate. Their team helped us every step of the way. Thanks to Queue-Fair we were able to provide our users with a good-looking and functioning automated queue. They have a beautiful administrative dashboard. We are glad we found Queue-Fair and that we can count on them for our business needs. We love the service!’
‘Quality product and Reliable Service. We were shocked at how fast it was to set up and how easy it was to use. The product worked exactly as intended. We want to thank the Queue-Fair team for making the process seamless and for their support for helping us with the set up. When we have similar events, we will be sure to use Queue-Fair.’
‘SUCCESS!!! Yesterday went so smoothly that my client cried. Literally. Such a fantastic experience all around. Incredible support. Incredible product that provided an excellent experience for the end user. My client was thrilled as we watched from the Queue-Fair dashboard as the users rolled in to the virtual waiting room then were passed to the site and successfully made their purchases.’
‘Communication and the easy use of Queue-Fair's platform really make the product outstanding. We needed a queue for a particularly busy event on our website, and I could see it in real-time, make changes effectively and make sure our website wasn't going to crash. Whenever I had questions or needed support, they were very helpful. I definitely recommend the platform and service.’
‘A big Thank You for turning our enquiry around so quickly. Emailed at 9pm Wednesday, received a fully branded Queue page ready to use at 11am Thursday. Simply brilliant! The dashboard and features are great - really intuitive, really clean and easy to use. We queued over 22,000 people for our product launch event at a cost that was extremely competitive. Thanks so much for everything! I'm really happy to give Queue-Fair a glowing testimonial and would recommend them to any business who needs a queue system for their event or promotion.’
‘Amazing support and great tool. I loved the simplicity of setup and use. Queue-Fair enabled us to manage traffic during the launch. Last year our site went down and we had issues with that! This year problem was solved by simple adding Queue-Fair script.’
Even the world's biggest companies get overwhelmed by peaks in demand, particularly sudden peaks. Systems architects make decisions based on expected demand and usual traffic rates. It is usually not possible to scale the tech serving your site on demand to prevent a website crash. All webservers have limits, and when they are exceeded, your visitors experience a crashed site.
More Orders
People who have been queued are keener to purchase and buy more - as much as 20% more in each shopping cart, according to our customers.
More Customers
Queue-Fair means you can serve new customers even when your servers are too busy to handle them. People who see an error page or no response at all from your site are unlikely to return - but you can reach all these people with Queue-Fair.
More Fair
Our unique synchronized people ahead counter means that people in the queue can always see that it is moving fairly.
More Ethical
Fairness matters to your visitors, and of course to us! We ensure no-one loses their place in our original first-come, first-served queues, and that visitors arrive at your site in the same order that they joined the queue. That's why we invented it in the first place.
More Fun
Animated progress bars in a range of brand-matching styles. Our unique synchronized ticking People Ahead Counter shows visitors that the queue is always moving forward, and always moving fairly.
Safeguard your website from crashes, peaks, bots and also your company's ethical reputation
More Safe
Discover the wealth of security features available with Queue-Fair to protect your site, app or NFT drop from malicious use.
More Responsible
Our wonderful customers tell us we're lovely people and a pleasure to deal with - and that's what really matters to us. We created the Virutal Waiting Room to make the world a fairer place, so you can be sure of our core values. We always put our customers first. Always.
More Value
Our proprietary process is cheaper to run than any other method. We pass on the cost savings to you. This also allows us to give you more on our Free Tier service than any other provider.
More Speed
Our process means we run the fastest queue servers in the world, and offer unlimited queue capacity on all our service plans.
More Opportunity
Keep the customers that you would lose to your competitors during costly down time. Use your queues to show product slideshows, videos or personalised marketing content to your visitors while they wait.
More Equitable
Our PreSale randomiser prevents touts & scalpers from snapping up all your tickets or stock, and we can use the queue to enforce one-order-per-customer for you too.
More Reliable
We run the most accurate Virtual Waiting Room service and will send you the exact right number of people each and every minute - the key to stable load on your servers. Unlike other providers our queues turn on the very instant that you need them too.
Adapters in every major web server language. Secure Plugins for every major ecommerce platform. Or, add Queue-Fair to your site with JavaScript with one line of code on your page - or no lines at all with Google Tag Manager.
You can also run Queue-Fair at the Network-edge, running on your CDN or Cloud Services provider before requests reach your origin server.
Adapters available for your busy iOS, Android and React Native apps too.
Find out why Queue-Fair is the most widely-integrated queue platform on earth.
Protect your e-commerce site from costly down time
Queue-Fair helps you reach the customers that would be lost when your systems are overloaded, so your site or app can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate.
Sell all your tickets in one day safely and securely
Prevent the dreaded Refresh Refresh Refresh that kills your servers and damages fan loyalty. Show them that you care about their experience with our fair queue.
Cope gracefully with events, registrations and enrolments
You needn't scale your systems just for one busy day a year. Queue-Fair is fair and transparent for your students - who can go away and come back later without losing their place.
Handle massive public demand effortlessly and safely
Why stress out your IT department or your stakeholders? Conserve your resources and cope with any level of demand gracefully with Queue-Fair.
Invented and originally patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
2026 The Fair Queue People Ltd. - All Rights Reserved.
Part of the Orderly family of queue solutions - OrderlyQ - OrderlyStats - WeQ4U